A comment about my walks getting longer from an accountability buddy on my fitness tracker (Jawbone UP2 for anyone that cares) lead to a long walk at lunch, with three hill sprints! I blame the weather (Spring is close, I feel it in my bones) and that comment.

On the bright side, I caught a lot of Magikarp walking along the riverbank.

Despite the exercise, I didn’t get into the groove of the day work-wise. Managed to get a few brainless things done, a longer list of those will be handy next time brain decides to get-up-and-go.

Staying on the music front for a bit : Heavy Music Magazine on Facebook noted that Metallica’s “…And Justice for All”, their fourth album, was released on this day, 25 August in 1988.

Wow. So many memories. Remind me to tell you about “seeing them on tour, getting the t-shirt, being in a car rolling off mountain in that t-shirt and surviving” sometime.

Work day done I walked, as I do, over the bridge to find a tram or train. This sight stopped me : I paused for a moment of gratitude and snapped a pic. I love living in Melbourne, especially when it shares moments like these.

Watched Dwayne & the Rock Clock on Graham Norton : originally aired on Friday 10th June 2016. Thanks Australian TV for random repeats in primetime. The Rock Clock is Dwayne’s app to help you reach your goals. Cute. It has an alarm and no snooze button, just The Rock saying things like “get your candy ass outta bed!” That was in my head the morning after!

Yes, it is time for Australian Blogging conference put on by Darren & his amazing team over at Problogger Events – I bought the ticket way back in March!

Accommodation was booked a few days ago and flights just yesterday.

Let’s hope I got them all correct – I certainly was distracted when I booked the flight up to the Gold Coast, since I was stung by the $8.50 fee the airlines love to charge when you don’t use the very specific payment method they like. This leg is on Tiger and I plain forgot to use the Mastercard. Duh.

Just quietly – the process of booking flights is exhausting. Navigating through all the options, upgrades and upsells was just nasty. Which, I suppose, is the point. They’d love you to cave in at some point and just book whatever they stick onto your fare.

So why aren’t the car showrooms full of self-driving robot cars? That’s a great question. One that was answered, for me, at the Singularity Summit Australia a few weeks ago here in Melbourne by James Newton-Thomas.

James spoke about his career with AI (artificial intelligence) – way back in the 1980s he had developed loan officer systems that the human loan officers came to rely upon! Through the 1990s he worked on autonomous vehicle AIs for Caterpillar (the big name in mining vehicles.) The comment that really piqued my interest was this : having developed a robot vehicle to replace human operators, the stumbling block to implementation around the year 2000 was that the insurance premium was so high that it wasn’t a financially viable option.

Now that is really interesting. This means that ten years ago JNT had developed a robot vehicle that was ready for work in the mining industry but was essentially blocked by the insurance industry!

Why was the premium so high? I am not an insurance industry expert, so I couldn’t tell you. James did mention that his impression at the time was that since there was no history, no set of facts upon which to calculate the risk, the insurers erred on the cautious side (as they should be wont to do) and went high. Really high.

So that’s where we were until this week. Robot cars are certainly possible, because they have been built. Sure, not in mass production. Sure there are still limitations, but those are being rapidly eroded.

Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles.

Wow – that means there’s over five thousand driving hours (assuming 25mph average urban speed) of robot cars. In an urban environment.

Is that enough data for an insurer to make a better assessment? We can only hope so.